OpenAI Seeks $1.2 Trillion Valuation in New Funding Round
OpenAI, the AI partner of Microsoft, is reportedly seeking a valuation above US$1.2 trillion in a new funding round. The AI group is forecast to burn roughly US$278 billion in cash as it scales infrastructure and product development with Microsoft support. The prospective deal would reinforce OpenAI's role inside Microsoft's broader AI ecosystem, spanning Azure infrastructure and Copilot branded services. The funding push backs the view that rich AI workloads can keep Azure traffic and Copilot adoption growing, while also sharpening questions about capital intensity and dependency on a few large AI partners.
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China Opens Probe Into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI Over Suspected Leak of Classified Data
China's Cyberspace Administration has launched an investigation into Chinese startups DeepSeek and Moonshot AI over suspicions that state secrets were leaked to U.S. AI companies. The U.S. tech outlet The Information reported on the 22nd that Chinese authorities began the probe amid concerns over "distillation," in which the outputs of high-performance American AI models are used to train Chinese AI systems. According to a report published by U.S. AI startup Anthropic, DeepSeek and Moonshot sent users' questions to Anthropic's cutting-edge Claude model without authorization and used its answers to train their own models. The data involved also included internal information from the Chinese People's Liberation Army, public security authorities, and state-owned enterprises. The Trump administration and U.S. national security and investigative authorities have sharply condemned distillation. Ahead of the U.S.-China summit on the 24th, the issue of data security has come into sharp relief.
SpaceXAI's Grok Bot Tops 400,000 Users a Month After Launch
SpaceXAI's Grok Bot has surpassed 400,000 users barely a month after launch, reaching 418,000 users as of September 14, up 24% in a single week. The enterprise-focused agentic-AI tool launched in mid-August and is designed to complete tasks across different apps and file types, positioning SpaceXAI to gain traction beyond the consumer chatbot market. The milestone arrived alongside Monday's release of Grok 4.7, which SpaceXAI describes as its most capable frontier model yet for coding and knowledge work. Meta Platforms' competing Muse agent, aimed more directly at consumers, recorded about 730,000 downloads in its first 10 days following its September 8 launch and reached the No. 1 position among free apps on both Apple's U.S. App Store and Google Play. SpaceXAI offers Grok Bot as a standalone application and through multiple AI subscription tiers, giving it several potential routes to convert adoption into recurring revenue.
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